European Water utilities environment is embedded in a context dealing with global issues such as water scarcity and technical-economic issues such as infrastructure aging. Management of drinking water supply is facing key challenges partly related to traditional water meter, such as managing capital and operational costs; water loss (also known as non-revenue water) due to leaks and other system failures; and water scarcity/conservation. The core of the solution lies in the renewed access and use of accurate data that Smart Water Metering can provide to decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments. SMART.MET strongly paves the way to a more efficient management providing for example automatic reading of the household meters and billing, real time assessment of water balance for leak detection, identification of abnormal behaviors and awareness-raising, ability to identify user-meters defaults. However, the lack of common European standards and lack of “open technological platforms” combined to the high transaction cost on the demand side create a lock-in situation in the market and determine a situation of long-term dependency of water operators on technology providers. This determines high average operating costs for water operators and users, as well as collective inefficiency related to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions on the offer side. The objective of the proposal is thus to drive the development of new technologies to manage smart metering data collection and management, driven by a group of 7 water utilities through a joint Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP). They are supported by 6 expert organizations for assessing the technologies, implement the new procurement procedures and disseminate the outcomes of the project to other utilities and solutions suppliers. The duration of the project is 48 months.

The project aims to implement innovative molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) based strategies, with integrated and complementary analytical and bioanalytical approaches allowing more effective monitoring of relevant pollutants at ultra-trace level in waters in order to: i) enable a more reliable- and representative-monitoring of relevant pollutants at ultra-trace level; ii) improve the understanding of mode of action of the selected pollutants focusing on endocrine disruption; iii) enhance the knowledge of cocktail effects in natural environments and iv) sustain the innovation and competiveness in environmental metrology at the national level. Thus, we propose to develop selective extraction sorbents inducing a retention mechanism based on the molecular recognition of the target compounds. Those sorbent will be used for selective extraction of real samples thus rendering their quantitative analysis more reliable and sensitive. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are synthetic polymers that possess specific cavities and that are therefore considered as antibody mimics, the cavities allowing a selective trapping of the target analytes as the recognition sites of antibodies. Several MIPs will be developed. A MIP will be developed for the selective trapping of atrazine, of some structural analogs (simazine, terbutryne, terbuthylazine) and of their main metabolites (deethylatrazine, deisopropylatrazine, desethylterbutylazine). Another MIP will be dedicated to the selective trapping of carbamazepine and its epoxy- and dihydroxy-forms and another one for benzodiazepines such as oxazepam, diazepam, etc... At last, an innovative screening approach based on the design of a MIP to selectively extract the glucuroconjugated compounds whatever the chemical group they belong in combination with High Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HRMS) approach will be developed. Each time, for a given target, several conditions of synthesis will be screened and the resulting MIPs will be evaluated by studying the occurrence of selective cavities and their ability to selectively trap structural analogs and metabolites. These synthetic sorbents will then be integrated in the sample pretreatment method for the selective extraction of the target analytes with a high degree of purification thus allowing to improve the reliability of the results in LC/MSn and their sensitivity. These MIPS will also be integrated in passive accumulative sampler as an alternative to the already available POCIS devices and to complement grab sampling thus allowing to accumulate and detect low level of contamination and mixtures of compounds including transformation products in real conditions. Those sampling devices will be treated by conventional analytical methods or detection by HRMS allowing the identification in the case of the glucuroconjugates. In parallel, the MIPs will be used as SPE sorbents in the existing on-line extraction system combined with UV spectrophotometry detection to increase the selectivity of the on-site monitoring device. In parallel to chemical analysis, the project aim to implement thyroid and estrogenic disruption assays, based on the use of aquatic larvae (amphibian and fish) with and without a previous clean-up on MIP to evaluate and better understand cocktail effects. The different methods, devices and procedures, concerning well-known and non target compounds, will be implemented on real conditions (monitoring of two sites -ground and surface waters-). They will be assessed with respect to conventional approaches and monitoring strategies, considering their effectiveness, robustness, metrological performances, ability to highlight pollution impacts, environmental cost and suitability. Chemometry is also included at different critical stages of the project especially experimental design and interpretation of monitoring data to maximize its efficiency and make more obvious the knowledge and lessons of the project.

This research project involves a partnership of French engineers and social scientists who have worked in parallel on the sustainability of water public services for several years, and more generally on what can be termed 'urban water', which includes the interaction between the city and its environment. In developed countries, for the first time at the end of the 20th century, the ever growing demand of potable water stopped and was even reversed in some places, reducing the income of those utilities which were funded exclusively or largely by water bills; and this took place at the moment when sewage collection and treatment services were increasingly transferred to water bills, and when drinking water criteria became more stringent. Lastly, water services are becoming a mature industry, with no more subsidies available to reproduce the huge and capital intensive infrastructure on the long run. This new situation generates a growing distrust from some customers and citizens, and distrust is also stirred by the yet very different situation observed in large cities of the South, where a significant proportion of the poor population is still not connected to the services, or with low quality and intermittent water. Paris Water Company, one of the largest in France, is very interested in developing new analyses and foresights to face a complex and uncertain future, and decided to join this project, and to support a comparative approach on other regions, other developed and developing countries. This utility serves only down town Paris, but interacts frequently with other actors in the water supply and the waste water fields. We broadly characterise the sustainability issue with what the Eurowater-Water 21 partnership (5th framework program, coordinated by Francisco Nunes Correia) termed the 3 Es: economic, environmental, and ethical-equitable. We have already developed an application of this approach to water services sustainability, with several cases of middle and large size cities in Europe (and Brasilia, Brazil). But it is clear that research is needed on the third axis, since it is crucial for the demand side approaches that are developing today. Not only do water utilities largely ignore the motivations of people to use more or less water, but they increasingly face complex management problems, which are increasingly difficult to solve through an increase of technological sophistication. This implies a new trade-off between water services and water resources, which is part of the issue of urban water. This in turn makes a fourth issue very important: multi-level governance of urban water. On each of the 4 issues the partnership proposes to perform additional research, so as to integrate improved approaches into a foresight model. This means there are 4 core-workpackages: • What are the deep causes for water demand growth or reduction, and how do consumptions interact with tariff systems and redistributive effects ? • Can we evaluate better the present and potential policies to support access and limit disconnection to vulnerable groups, despite growing costs and prices for water services? • How is the long lasting character of water systems infrastructure taken into account in its sustainable management, and is it possible to adopt alternative and cheaper technical solutions? • What new institutional formulas can help provide a better fit between functional and institutional territories? These tasks will be realised by the partners with interaction with the Eau de Paris, but we have also identified other types of metropolitan areas which are really worth while studying. We then have identified two territorial and transversal tasks, one on other large metropolises (Bordeaux, Nantes), and one on cities with fast growing suburbs (Montpellier, Perpignan, Beziers). The core part of the research will be prepared by a year of investigation on what is already available in other developed countries. This first year will also provide the time needed to recruit the non permanent personnel like PhD students and post-docs. Then the core research will develop during years 2 and 3 or more. The final year will be used to develop the 8th and last task: it consists in using all the accumulated knowledge into a foresight approach of the sustainability of water services, which will be discussed in an important international seminar to be organised towards the end. This project is co-ordinated by Bernard Barraqué and Sébastien Treyer (CIRED – CNRS), and mobilises the UMR Cemagref GSP (Strasbourg), the UMR G-Eau (Montpellier), the water and economics service in BRGM, UMR ADES in Bordeaux University, plus two private partners, Eau de Paris, and SMASH, a small company dedicated to data analysis for the social sciences.